Abraham Abulafia: A Starter Kit

How I Came to the Kabbalah

Gershom Scholem

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[-Y INTEREST in the Kabbalah— Jewish
mysticism— manifested itself early
on, while I was still living in Germany, my native
country. Perhaps it was because I was endowed
with an affinity for this area from the "root of my
soul," as the Kabbalists would have put it, or per-
haps it was my desire to understand the enigma of
Jewish history that was involved— and the exist-
ence of the Jews over the millennia is an enigma,
no matter what all the "explanations," in such
profuse supply, may have to say about it.

The great historian Heinrich Graetz, whose His-
tory of the Jews had entranced me as a young
man, displayed the greatest aversion to everything
connected with religious mysticism, as did almost
all the founders of the school of German Jewish
scholarship known as Wissenschaft des Judentums
in the last century. Graetz calls the Zohar, the clas-
sic work of the Spanish Kabbalah, a book of lies,
and employs a whole dictionary of invectives
whenever he speaks of the Kabbalists. Yet it
seemed improbable to me— I could not say why—
that Kabbalists could have been such charlatans,
buffoons, and masters of tomfoolery as he made
them out to be. Something seemed to me to be
hidden there, and it was this that attracted me.
The lasting impression made on me by Martin
Buber's first two volumes on Hasidism— written in
German and drenched in the romanticism and
flowery metaphors of the Vienna School and the
Jugendstil-mmt also have played a part in this
attraction.

Gershom Scholem, the foremost Jewish scholar of our age,
was born in Berlin in 1897, the son of an assimilated middle-
class Jewish family. In his adolescence he became a con-
vinced Zionist and began learning Hebrew. He later studied
mathematics and physics, then Semitic philology, in Berlin,
Jena, and Berne, completing a doctorate at the University of
Munich in 1922. The following year he emigrated to Pales-
tine. Mr. Scholem is professor emeritus of mysticism at the
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the author of numerous
works, including Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On the
Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical
Messiah, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and On Jews and
Judaism in Crisis. The present article, describing his early
studies in the Kabbalah and his first years in Jerusalem, is
adapted from an autobiographical memoir. From Berlin to
Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, which Schocken is bring-
ing out in September. Copyright © 1977 by Suhrkamp Ver-
lag. English translation copyright © 1980 by Schocken Books
Inc.

In any case, from 1915 on I timidly began read-
ing literature about the Kabbalah, and later tried
my hand at original texts of kabbalistic and has-
idic literature. This was fraught with difficulties in
Germany at that time, for though it was always
possible to find Talmud scholars, there was no one
to serve as a guide in this area. Once I tried to
persuade my teacher. Dr. Bleichrode, to read one
such text, a famous treatise on kabbalistic ethics
from the 16th century, with a number of us. After
a few hours he said, "Kinderlach, we have to give
up. I don't understand the quotations from the
Zohar and can't explain things to you properly."

So I had to try and familiarize myself with these
sources on my own. After all, though the Zohar
was written in Aramaic, it was no more intricate
than, say, the writings of Johann Georg Hamann,
several volumes of which I had in my room. I
bought myself an edition of the Zohar as well as
the four volumes of Molitor's work. The Philoso-
phy of History, or On Tradition, which was ac-
tually about the Kabbalah and could still be ob-
tained from the publisher for a song. It became
clear to me that the Christological reinterpreta-
tions of this author, a pupil of Schelling and
Baader, were completely wrongheaded, but that
he did know more about the subject than the Jew-
ish authorities of his day. I also read S. A. Horo-
dezky's writings, which at that time were almost
the only works in modern Hebrew literature on
the great holy men of Hasidism. I had found out
that Horodezky was living in Berne, and went to
see him. Though he was twenty-five years older
than I was, he received me in a very friendly fash-
ion, and immediately suggested that I translate
several chapters from his Hebrew manuscript (he
could not write German) which was to be a major
study of this subject. While I was working on the
translation, I realized there was something wrong
with Horodezky's writings, and that their author
was a rather unperceptive enthusiast.

Between 1915 and 1918 I filled quite a few note-
books with excerpts, translations, and reflections
on. the Kabbalah, though they were still far from
scholarly efforts or insights. But the fever had
taken hold, and in the spring of I9I9 I decided to
shift the focus of my academic work from mathe-
matics to Jewish studies and to begin a scholarly
investigation of the Kabbalah, at least for a few

40/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

years. I had no idea at the time that these few
years would turn into a lifetime's occupation. I
also had many other projects in mind at the time,
such as a book about the literature, the function,
and the metapliysics of the elegy in Hebrew litera-
ture. I had already done a series of studies on that
subject, and had published a translation in Bub-
er's magazine Der Jude ("The Jew") of a moving
medieval elegy about the burning of the Talmud
in Paris in 1240.

My decision determined my choice of a univer-
sity. Earlier, I had thought of completing my
mathematical studies at Gdttingen, the mathema-
ticians' mecca, but now the only choice was Mu-
nich, which had (and still has) Germany's greatest
collection of Hebrew manuscripts, including kab-
balistic writings.

To be sure, the universities did not encourage
Jewish studies in those days. Today, when there
are hardly any Jews remaining in Germany, all the
German universities are eager to establish chairs
in Judaica. But in those days, when Germany had
a lively Jewish population in great ferment, not a
single university or provincial ministry would
hear of Jewish studies. (What Heine wrote is
quite true: if there were only one Jew in the
world, everyone would come running to have a
look at him, but now that there are too many,
people try to look away.) Nonetheless, I wanted to
try and unlock these mysterious texts, written in
peculiar symbols, and make them comprehensible
—to myself and to others.

In the summer of 1918, I thought of a subject
which seemed to me both fruitful and philosophi-
cally relevant: the linguistic theory of the Kabba-
lah. This was an example of youthful exuberance,
if not arrogance, for when I tackled the project in
earnest, I soon came to realize that I did not know
nearly enough and had better start more systemat-
ically, and, above all, more modestly. I did, in
fact, write that study on the linguistic theory of
the Kabbalah— which I abandoned in 1920— ex-
actly fifty years later.

IN September 1919 I returned to Ger-
many from Switzerland. Thanks to ex-
treme frugality I had been able to save a few
hundred francs from the monthly allowance I re-
ceived from my parents. To be sure, I overdid
things somewhat— for weeks on end I ate nothing
but fried eggs and potatoes at a cheap restaurant
—and the price I paid for those excesses was a vi-
tamin deficiency. My medical guardian angel. Dr.
Meyer, took me aside at his niece's wedding, told
me he didn't like my looks, and ordered me to
come and see him the following morning. After-
ward, he wrote my parents in Berlin saying I had
to eat better, and from then on I received an addi-
tional fifty francs a month.

In the fall I took the money I had saved to my
two second-hand book dealers in Berlin and
bought kabbalistic writings, among them a French

translation of the Zohar which had appeared in
Paris between 1906 and 1912 in six thick volumes.
It was the work of a mysterious individual who
called himself Jean de Pauly, and it had been
printed by France's biggest paper manufacturer,
Emile Lafuna-Giraud, on wonderful paper (with
the Hebrew name of God as a watermarki) that
had been made especially for this one work. The
reason I tell this story is to indicate the state of
Kabbalah scholarship at that time, for this univer-
sally praised chef-d'oeuvre, which was quoted every-
where and served as the basis for whole books,
was actually a blatant fraud. Written by a half-
educated swindler from Eastern Galicia, it was full
of brazen fabrications which included, among
other things, a separate 450-page volume of notes
made up from beginning to end of fictitious quo-
tations and citations of nonexistent books or non-
existent chapters in well-known kabbalistic clas-
sics. The work had simply never been checked,
and when I said all this in Munich at the time, no
one would believe me. How did I know, I was
asked, that these books did not even exist? Such
were my beginnings in the field of kabbalistic
studies.

In Munich I managed to find a large room in
an apartment at 98 Turkenstrasse (near the Vic-
tory Arch and directly opposite the Academy of
Arts), and another one in the same apartment for
my cousin Heinz Pflaum, who had just begun his
studies in Romance languages and literatures. A
third room in the place was already occupied by
the artist "Tom" Freud (Sigmund's niece), so the
three of us made up a small Zionist colony. At the
university, I took one last course in mathematics
with the famous Alfred Pringsheim, but really
concentrated on philosophy and Semitics, which I
was considering as a second minor. Instead of my
original dissertation on the "Linguistic Philosophy
of the Kabbalah, " I now decided to undertake a
more modest project: a translation and commen-
tary on the Book of Bahir, which was the oldest
extant kabbalistic text and extremely difficult.

I proposed this to Clemens Baiimker, a distin-
guished historian of medieval philosophy at the
university who was interested in medieval Jewish
thought and had been very encouraging to me in
my studies. Baiimker agreed to accept the project
as my dissertation, calling the kabbalistic field a
terra incognita, but told me that in order to get
the doctorate in philosophy, I would have to
minor in psychology, a subject I heartily detested.
He assured me he could arrange the matter with a
colleague of his in the psychology department-
one Herr Becher.

The problem was, I could not stand this col-
league, who specialized in brain weights. My gen-
eral dislike of the subject was only intensified by
what I had seen of the phenomenological analysis
of psychological problems which was very much in
vogue at the time. After some years of sympathy
for phenomenology, based on my admiration for

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/41

Husserl's Logical Investigations, I was on the verge
of breaking with it in any case, but it was the lec-
tures of Husserl's disciple, Wilhelm Pfander,
which alienated me from this mode of thinking
once and for all. At one of these lectures Pfander
accomplished the feat of making visible the exist-
ence of God (which I had never doubted) by
phenomenological means. This was too much for
me. Pfander's seminar, too, where a discussion
went on in dead earnest, lasting many hours and
with the assistance of some very penetrating
minds, over the question of whether a fried fish
was or was not a fish contributed further to driv-
ing me out of this circle.

Thus, on Baiimker's advice I changed my major
to Semitics, where I received a very friendly recep-
tion from Fritz Hommel (in whose Arabic discus-
sion group and seminar I was already enrolled),
though Hommel had accepted a dissertation in the
field of Judaica only once in his long career. Both
Baiimker and Hommel were already over sixty-five
—the one a devout Catholic, the other an equally
devout Protestant, Hommel was primarily an Assyr-
iolc^ist, but he was generous enough to exempt
me from this particular area of Semitics and asked
only that my major include Arabic and Ethiopian
in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic with which I
was already conversant.

One course I did not take in the Semitics de-
partment was "Readings in the Babylonian Tal-
mud," which was given by the Catholic Old Testa-
ment scholar, Gottesbeyer. Two other Jewish stu-
dents and I (the rest were Catholic seminarians)
went to the first session to have a look and the
professor made a bad blunder right from the start.
The Talmud has no punctuation, of course, so
one of the difficulties in studying it is to determine
whether one is dealing with the declarative or in-
terrogative mode. The professor got it wrong, and
one of us raised his hand to correct him: "Profes-
sor, that is not a statement but a question." "How
do you know?" "It says so in Rashi." "Rabbinical
sophistry!" the professor replied, and with that the
discussion was closed. So we realized to our amuse-
ment that nothing was to be learned from that
particular gentleman.

There was, however, one excellent Talmiidist
in Munich-Heinrich Ehrentreu-with whom we
studied the tractate on marriage contracts for an
hour a day, (It may sound strange, but this partic-
ular tractate is actually one of the most interesting
and contains, so to speak, everything— which is
why it is known as "the Little Talmud.") Like
many rabbis in Germany, Dr, Ehrentreu had come
from Hungary. He was a first-rate scribe, looked
just the way one imagines a talmudic sage, and
was an even-tempered, peaceable man. In this, he
was quite different from the younger generation of
Orthodox Jews who were very combative. Many of
them were just beginning to go oft to study in the
harshly anti-Zionist yeshivahs of Hungary and
Lithuania, and they often returned home after a

year or two very much changed. Ehrentreu knew I
was not Orthodox but liked me nonetheless. One
of his sons, however, home on vacation from the
yeshivah at Galenta, refused to shake hands with
me and asked his father how he could tolerate
such a heretic in his Talmud course, "The light in
the Torah will lead him to what is good," said his
father, quoting from the Talmud. Bleichrode and
Ehrentreu were the two teachers of my youth
whom I remember with the warmest gratitude.

That year, I read Maimonides's Guide for the
Perplexed in Hebrew. Luckily, I was studying Ara-
bic syntax at the time, so I could cope more easily
with the Arabic sentence structure, which is pre-
served literally in the Hebrew and often causes
great hardship in understanding the text. Most of
my time, however, I spent in the manuscript room
of the Bavarian State Library where my table was
strewn with Hebrew codices and printed works. At
the next table sat an unusually slender man, per-
haps ten years older than I, with the unmistakably
sharp and intense features of a Jewish intellectual.
His table was piled high with German manu-
scripts, and he generally took his seat, as I did,
shortly after the reading room opened. My neigh-
bor turned out to be Eduard Berend, the out-
standing Jean Paul scholar, who was working on
his definitive edition of this, my favorite among
German classical writers. When I confessed my
love for Jean Paul, Berend asked me for informa-
tion on his many rabbinical stories. (Jean Paul
and Paul Scheerbart were the only German au-
thors whose works I took along with me when I
emigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1923.)

IN Munich I met Gustav Steinschneider,
with whom I had been in the same pla-
toon in the army in 1917, He was the grandson of
Moritz Steinschneider, the greatest Hebrew bib-
liographer and manuscript expert of the last cen-
tury, who at a ripe old age made no bones about
the fact that the function of the Science of Juda-
ism, as he saw it, was to provide a decent burial
for Judaism, an important but declining phenom-
enon. Surely Steinschneider, a stupendous scholar
and a man I greatly admired, was the first author-
ity in this field who was admittedly an agnostic
and possibly even an atheist! In those days I gave
a lot of thought to this group of scholarly liquida-
tors, and planned to write an article for my friend
Walter Benjamin's projected magazine, Angelus
iVoywi, showing that the so-called Science of Juda-
ism was really the suicide of Judaism. But the
magazine never appeared.

Gustav came from a family that was rather simi-
lar to mine. His father was a monist, and one of
the leading members of the Berlin Monistenbund,
which at that time was probably the best-known
organization of leftist atheists. His older brother
became a Communist and his younger brother an
ardent Zionist and one of the first German hal-
utzim. Gustav himself, a very quiet and thought-

42/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

ful man, vacillated between the two camps. Like
his younger brother, Karl, he had a kind of natural
nobility and great musical talent, but was utterly
unworldly and incapable of doing anything
"practical." He spoke very slowly and with a melo-
dious drawl, pronouncing even the word, Scheisse
("shit")— which as everyone knows is the most
frequent word in any soldier's vocabulary— in an
inimitable way, as though it were a German lin-
guistic treasure, perhaps part of the cultic lan-
guage of Stefan George and his circle.

Gustav inclined to hypochondria, and his thin,
somewhat weary face betrayed unmistakable signs
of the potential philosopher. In the four years be-
fore my emigration we were on the friendliest
terms— perhaps it was the total opposition of our
characters that attracted us to one another. Gustav
spent the first year in Munich with my fiancee
Escha Burckhardt and me, and we both tried— un-
successfully, of course— to persuade him to enroll
in some systematic course of studies. After 1933 it
took all the "pull" I could muster— the interces-
sion of my friend Zalman Rubashov with the
mayor of Tel Aviv— to find Gustav (and other
Ph.D.'s and artists in every imaginable field) a job
as a street cleaner in Palestine. This nocturnal em-
ployment allowed him to philosophize by day or
to play four-handed duets with my aunt. (As a
street cleaner, incidentally, Gustav was highly re-
spected and popular among his colleagues, this
being one of the occupations which did not re-
quire a knowledge of Hebrew.)

AFTER my cousin had left Munich for
Heidelberg, Escha moved into his
room on TUrkenstrasse. At the end of the cor-
ridor lived, as I have mentioned, "Tom" Freud,
one of the unforgettable figures of those years. In
contrast to her older sister, Lilly, who was married
to the actor Arnold Marie and was a great beauty,
"Tom" was of an almost picturesque ugliness. As
an illustrator (and occasional writer) of children's
books she bordered on genius, and had been en-
gaged to do the drawings for a children's book by
the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon (who had taken
up permanent residence in Palestine but was now
temporarily living in Munich), in which every let-
ter of the Hebrew alphabet was clescribed and ex-
tolled in verse. "Tom," who seemed to live only on
cigarettes and whose room was usually filled with
smoke, was an authentic bohemian who had myr-
iad contacts with artists and writers of all sorts. It
was in her room, for example, that I had a vehe-
ment discussion about Zionism with the writer
Otto Flake, who was well-known at the time.
Flake was a member of the liberal Left and an ad-
vocate of total assimilation for German Jewry,
which he expected would produce great benefits
for the Germans. I was certainly the wrong person
to express such views to, and our conversation re-
flected it. Unless I am mistaken, from then on he
no longer regarded the matter as quite so simple.

Agnon was about to marry Esther Marx, the
beautiful daughter of one of the most aristocratic
Orthodox Jewish families in Germany. She had
two qualities I considered especially memorable in
those days: she was as confirmed an atheist as she
was an admirer and master of the Hebrew lan-
guage—a rare combination among German Jews.
Esther was spending the winter in Starnberg, and
Agnon proudly showed me his postcards from her,
which were written in flawless calligraphy and al-
most flawless Hebrew. At that time I translated a
good number of Agnon's shorter stories into Ger-
man, some of them from manuscript, including a
few perfect writings of his which later appeared in
Der Jude. We frequently took walks together in
the city, along the Isar River or in Munich's fa-
mous English Gardens, and Agnon, a tireless con-
versationalist, held forth about his particular likes
and dislikes among Hebrew writers— especially on
the contemporary scene. (I probably did my share
of talking too.) We also spoke a lot about German
Jewry, each of us displaying his own form of criti-
cal detachment from it. In those days Agnon had
befriended a number of German intellectuals, and
he was always singing their praises to me. Having
come from abroad, he seemed to have a deeper in-
tuitive understanding of many Germans than I
did.

0"h

kN MY way back from Switzerland I
'had visited Martin Buber at Heppen-
heim, and he greeted the news of my decision to
address myself to the Kabbalah with great interest.
When I told him I was going to Munich, he pro-
duced an eight-page booklet from among his pa-
pers containing the rules and regulations of a new
organization that had just been founded in Mu-
nich—the "Johann Albert Widmanstetter Society
for Kabbalah Research, Inc." Along with the pam-
phlet—and this came as a real surprise—was his
own membership card in the group dated Novem-
ber 5, 1918. The purpose of the Society, as stated
in Paragraph 1 of its bylaws (I still have the pros-
pectus which may be the only extant copy), was
'to promote research in the Kabbalah and its lit-
erary documents, long neglected as a result of prej-
udice and external circumstances of a non-scien-
tific nature." Nor was that all: the chairman and
vice-chairman of the proposed board of directors
were none other than my two future thesis super-
visors, Fritz Hommel and Clemens Baumker,
who had never breathed a word to me about the
group.

Buber filled me in on the background, explaining
that the Widmanstetter Society owed its existence
to one Robert Eisler, who was its "Secretary" and
actually its only active member. The name meant
nothing to me, stripling that I was, but Buber en-
lightened me. Eisler, the son of a Viennese mil-
lionaire, was an incredibly gifted man in his mid-
dle thirties, as agile as he was ambitious, with far-
ranging scholarly interests as well as considerable

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/43

dramatic ability. Buber said he had published a
very interesting two-volume work with the intri-
guing title, Cosmic Cloak and Heavenly Canopy,
which stamped him as an original if hypothesis-
happy historian of religion, but which had been
received by authorities in the field with great res-
ervations. Eisler had also performed the unique
feat of earning two doctorates from the same
school at the University of Vienna— one as a very
young man in economics, and another one years
later in art history— since it had never occurred to
anyone that the two Eislers could be one and the
same person. He had had himself baptized for love
of the daughter of a well-known Austrian painter,
but despite the gesture, his various attempts to se-
cure a teaching position had always been
thwarted. The Gentiles were made uneasy by his
markedly Jewish appearance, and the Jews by his
apostasy.

The idea of founding a society for Kabbalah re-
search had been Eisler's idea, and Buber described
how, through letters and personal visits, he had
persuaded ten well-known scholars to lend their
names to the society's sponsoring committee
(whose aims, after all, made a lot of sense). Eisler
had visited Buber early in 1918 and shown him
the testimonials he had received from all these
professors (among them the son of Heinrich
Graetz. the historian, who was a professor of phys-
ics in Munich). At the same time he had submit-
ted an essay to Der Jude outlining the importance
of kabbalistic research for the history of religion
in general and the understanding of Judaism in
particular.

Buber showed me the proofs of this essay
(which are still in my possession), saying he had
told Eisler that though he published essays by
non-Jews in his magazine, he could not very well
include contributions by Jewish converts, no mat-
ter what their motives for baptism might have
been. Eisler had replied that he had long since de-
cided to return to Judaism and was just about to
take this step under the aegis of the Jewish Com-
munity Council in Munich. Buber had then
agreed to have the article set in type, but said he
could not. publish it until Eisler notified him that
his "reconversion" has been accomplished. Since
then, Buber had heard nothing further from Eis-
ler, except for the prospectus which had arrived,
adorned by his own name. A year and a half hav-
ing now gone by, Buber assumed that Eisler had
reverted to his former status, and was therefore
making me a present of the article which was not
going to appear but might interest me. At any
rate, he suggested that I look in on this Eisler,
who was living at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg.

I took Buber's advice, having first obtained a
copy of Eisler's book. This inspired me to add his
name to the catalogue of the imaginary university
Walter Benjamin and I had founded the year be-
fore in Switzerland, with a course called "Wom-
en's Coats and Beach Cabanas in the Light of the

History of Religion." There followed one of the
most bizarre encounters of my life when Eisler in-
vited me to visit him in his little villa on Lake
Starnberg which dated from his days as a million-
aire's son. (During the inflation, Eisler, like al-
most everyone else, had lost everything, except for
that house, and lived by taking in "paying guests"
from England.)

I was taken first to Eisler's library, crammed to
the ceiling with scholarly works about everything
under the sun. A set of ten quarto volumes bound
in green morocco and bearing the title Erotica et
Curiosa caught my eye. Ever industrious, I pulled
out one of the volumes to have a look, and it
turned out to be a dummy, with cognac glasses
and bottles of whiskey concealed behind it.

EISLER received me with open arms.
After all, I was, so to speak, the angel
sent from heaven to breathe kabbalistic life into
his paper society. Since many of the Hebrew man-
uscripts in Munich, including the kabbalistic ones
with which I was going to spend the next two
years, derived originally from the collection of Jo-
hann Albert Widmanstetter ' (d. 1557)— from
whom the Society had taken its name— what bet-
ter person than I could have come his way? Eis-
ler's own research in this field, as he described it
(particularly his "discovery" of the true author of
the Book of Yetzirah, which the Kabbalists had
appropriated as their basic text), was so frivolous
that it drew from me only a skeptical shudder—
the more so since I was now subjecting myself to
serious philological discipline.

In general, Eisler's eloquence, as fantastic as his
education, was somehow not quite serious. I at any
rate had never before come across such a compel-
ling yet at the same time suspiciously glittering
kind of erudition. He was, incidentally, quite
without rancor at being challenged, a trait I
found particularly endearing, especially since I
was bound to detect the regrettable gaps in his
Hebrew sooner or later. He once said to me, "I
suppose you think I'm a nebbish philologist," but
he really did not seem to take offense at my judg-
ment of him. His fanciful syntheses overcame all
the hurdles of historical criticism, and the one
thing that could truly not be said of him was that
he was lacking in ideas, and ideas, moreover, in
such diverse areas as the proto-Semitic inscriptions
in the Sinai Peninsula, the Greek mysteries, the or-
igin of the Gypsies, the history of money, the ori-
gins of Christianity, and many others which had
one thing in common: they were all rich enough
in unsolved problems to allow the widest possible
scope to his particular genius for synthesizing.

Hearing him lecture, one could not help but be
overwhelmed by his rhetorical gifts; reading his
writings, one was left speechless by the sheer
wealth of quotations and references— frequently
to the most obscure and far-fetched sources imagi-
nable, I have never again seen a comparable Ras-

44/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

telli* of scholarship. Eisler's opponents (and he
did not have many defenders, though a few of
them were quite influential) called him, with
slightly veiled anti-Semitic innuendo, a speculator
who had accidentally strayed onto the field- of
scholarship. In short, Eisler was unique in his way.
Unfortunately, no publisher who had ever
brought out a book of his would have any further
dealings with him, for in the course of reading
proofs he would invariably rewrite the book and
make it at least twice as long, so that every publi-
cation ended with a quarrel.

Through Eisler I first learned about the circle
that was forming in Hamburg around Aby War-
burg and his library of cultural history. This li-
brary had been the scene, in the early 20's, of a
celebrated lecture by Warburg which was greeted
with great enthusiasm and took up no less than
400 pages (in small print) when it was eventually
published. Eisler's description of the new perspec-
tives being explored by this group— which were to
have far-reaching consequences— aroused my live-
liest interest, just as my own studies aroused a
corresponding interest in Hamburg from 1926 on.
After two visits to the city in 1927 and 1932, I was
in close scholarly contact with this circle and on
friendly terms with a number of its members. (For
the twenty-five years of its existence, the group
had consisted almost exclusively of Jews whose
Jewish commitment ranged from lukewarm to
sub-zero. I used to define the three groups around,
respectively, the Warburg library, Max Horkhei-
mer's Institute for Social Research, and the meta-
physical magicians around Oskar Goldberg as the
three most remarkable "Jewish sects" that German
Jewry had produced. Not all of them liked to hear
this.)

In his dealings with me, Eisler was completely
Jewish. His store of Jewish jokes and anecdotes
was virtually inexhaustible, and he felt free when
he was with me to pour out that Jewish heart
which he kept carefully under wraps when dealing
with non-Jews. I remained in touch with him
until 1938, when, after some terrible weeks in a
concentration camp, he managed to get to Eng-
land. Then in 1946, out of the blue, I suddenly re-
ceived a 250-page manuscript ("with cordial re-
gards") containing Eisler's definitive solution of
the Palestine question, for which he was seeking a
publisher (he never found one).

Eisler had been pro-Zionist for years, and had
written to me that he intended to leave his library
to the University of Jerusalem. Now in 1946 he
came up with a proposal that was truly original,
and all the more so amid the anti-Zionist out-
bursts of the period (Ernest Bevin was in White-
hall at the time, and doing his best to liquidate
Zionism): a committee consisting of three Angli-
can theologians and three strictly Orthodox rabbis
to rule on the credentials of all Jews living in Pal-
estine. Those who were not deemed kosher
enough to be allowed to remain in the country as

pious worshippers were to be given the choice of
returning to their countries of origin or (if thev
wanted a Jewish state) of taking possession of the
second district of Vienna (the Leopoldstadt) as
well as the entire city of Frankfurt am Main; these
territories were to be evacuated by the Germans
and placed under international guarantees as a
Jewish state. After all, the Germans— considering
everything they had perpetrated— had now for
feited the right to complain if Frankfurt am Main,
home of the most famous of all Jewish communi-
ties in Germany, were taken from them and de-
clared a Jewish state. Eisler proposed further that
the British fleet be utilized for transport purposes
I sent back the manuscript with a slip on which
I had written just one word: "Enough. " Neverthe-
less, my first two books, which were published in
Germany in 1923 and 1927, did actually appear as
volumes ] and 2 in the series Sources and Studies
in the History of Jewish Mysticism, edited for the
Johann Albert Widmanstetter Society by Robert
Eisler. These were the only signs of life ever
shown by this fictitious society.

O'',

kNE day Eisler informed me that he
had told the writer Gustav Meyrink
about my kabbalistic studies and that Meyrink
wanted to invite me to Starnberg to explain cer-
tain passages in his own writings to him. Natu
rally this seeined a bit strange to me. In those days
Meyrink was a famous author who combined an
extraordinary talent for anti-bourgeois satire (The
German Philistine's Magic Horn) with a no less
distinctive talent for mystical sensationalism. The
latter quality was reflected primarily in his short
stories, some of them very impressive but not quite
serious, whose literary quality has been surpassed
in our time only by Jorge Luis Borges. At that
point Meyrink had also published two widely read
mystical novels, The Golem and The Green Face,
both of which I myself had read with a good deal
of head-shaking over their pseudo-Kabbalism.

Thus it was with a certain amount of curiosity
that I went out to Starnberg one afternoon in
1921 to make the acquaintance of a man in whom
deep-rooted mystical convictions and literary char-
latanism were almost inextricably combined. He
showed me a few passages in his novels which he
claimed not to understand and asked me to ex-
plain them to him. For someone like myself who
not only knew something about the Kabbalah but
also knew of its distortions and misuse in the oc-
cult writings of the Madame Blavatsky circle, this
was not very hard to do. But it also opened my
eyes to how an author can score points with pseudo-
mysticism. I will give only one example here.
In one profoundly "mystical ' chapter in The
Golem the hero experiences a kabbalistic vision. A
figure appears to him whose chest is covered with

* The legendarv Italian juggler, Enrico Rastelli (1896-
1931),-Ed.

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/45

luminous hieroglyphs in some foreign script. The
figure asks the hero whether he can read them.
The chapter continues: "And when I ... an-
swered in the negative, he stretched the palms of
his hands toward me and the inscription appeared
on my chest in luminous letters which were at first
in the Latin alphabet, chabrat sereh aur
BOCHER, and gradually changed into letters that
were unknown to me." I explained to Meyrink
that the inscription must simply be the mystical
name of some sort of lodge retranslated into He-
brew—something like "Lodge of Aurora's Seed,"
though I could not say whether or not such a
lodge had ever actually existed. Not until fifty
years later did I find out that the inscription was
nothing but a retranslation of the name of the so-
called Frankfurt Jewish lodge of the Napoleonic
era, famous in the history of Freemasonry, which
had been known as the Aurora Lodge of the Ris-
ing Dawn. It had simply been transcribed incor-
rectly by some ignoramus in one of the books in
Meyrink's library.

Later, when we were drinking coffee together,
Meyrink— whose undistinguished appearance (he
looked like the very model of a petty bourgeois)
contrasted with the fantastic stories he wrote—
told me about some of his own experiences. He
claimed, for example, to have cured himself by
magic of tuberculosis of the spinal-cord marrow,
an invariably fatal disease. Suddenly, without pre-
liminaries, Meyrink asked me: "Do you know
where God lives?" It was hardly possible to answer
such a question precisely— except perhaps by
quoting Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk: Wherever one
lets Him in— but Meyrink answered it himself. He
gave me a penetrating look and said: "In the
spinal cord." This was new to me and marked my
first acquaintance with the famous Yoga work. The
Serpent Power, by Sir John Woodroffe, alias Rich-
ard Avalon, of which Meyrink probably owned
the only copy in Germany at the time.

I visited Meyrink on one or two other occasions,
and he never failed to astonish me. He had the
idea, for instance, of publishing fictional biogra-
phies of great occultists and mystagogues and asked
me whether I would be willing to write one about
the most famous of all Kabbalists, Isaac Luria. He
himself planned to write something of this nature
about Eliphas Levi who, unlike Luria, an authen-
tic mystic, certainly did belong in such a series.
The number of writers, as we all know, who have
hidden their good Jewish names behind pseudo-
nyms is legion. But there is one rare, if not unique,
case of an author who took the opposite path,
namely Alphonse Louis Constant, who under the
Hebrew pseudonym of Eliphas Levi published
works of imaginative quackery as a grand kabbal-
iste, and by no means without success. Meyrink's
last book, The Angel from the Western Window,
was based on the same idea, describing in a pro-
foundly mystical novel the life of Dr. John Dee, a
famous scholar and occultist of Elizabethan times.

IN Munich I had a chance to see bur-
geoning Nazism at the university. The
atmosphere in the city was unbearable, though
this is often disregarded today or considerably
played down. But there was no disregarding the
giant, blood-red posters with their equally blood-
thirsty slogans inviting the public tQ attend Hit-
ler's rallies: "Fellow Germans are welcome. Jews
will not be admitted." I was not much affected by
all this, for I had long since made my decision to
leave Germany, but it was frightening to observe
the blindness of the Jews and their refusal to ac-
knowledge what was going on. This attitude hurt
my relations with Munich Jews who became ex-
tremely jumpy and angry when the subject was
broached.

I finished my dissertation at the end of January
1923 and prepared for my oral examination. Hom-
mel advised me not to open a book for the last
two weeks before the exam, but instead to go for
walks in the English Garden or do anything else I
enjoyed doing, and forget about the exam alto-
gether. This, he assured me, would be more valua-
ble than any amount of cramming. A perceptive
man! I followed his advice, and as it turned out
did well enough in my orals to be offered Habili-
tation* at the University of Munich with the pros-
pect of a teaching appointment— provided that I
present an appropriate piece of research. As I have
already mentioned, research in the field I had cho-
sen would have been a novelty at a German uni-
versity. But though I did not seriously consider
the offer, I was able to use it as a trump card in
dealing with my father and his objections to my
planned emigration to Eretz Yisrael.

As it happened, my father became gravely ill on
the very next day, which was his birthday. A tele-
gram called me to Berlin, and for a few days the
doctors held out hardly any hope. Eventually he
recovered, though very slowly, and from that time
on had to take very good care of himself, so that
my two elder brothers, who had gone into the
printing business with him, took over most of the
responsibilities. When my father was out of dan-
ger, I returned to Munich to ship my books and
other things to Berlin.

From there I went to Frankfurt for a few days,
hoping to see Franz Rosenzweig. I had been there
for a short time the year before and we had met
several times. I had first heard about Rosenzweig
through Rudolf Hallo, a fellow student in Mu-
nich, who came from Kassel, like Rosenweig, and
had been deeply influenced by him. From Hallo I
learned much about Rosenzweig's development
and his turn to Judaism and it was he who early
in 1920 introduced me to Rosenzweig's recently
published The Star of Redemption, undoubtedly
one of the central creations of Jewish religious
thought in this century. Rosenzweig had also heard

• A post-doctoral research project required in order i
secure a teaching appointment at a university.— Ed.

46/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

about me from various sources, and the two of us
began corresponding. (At that time Rosenzweig
still had his health and was studying Talmud with
the famous Rabbi Nobel in Frankfurt.)

Every encounter with Rosenzweig furnished evi-
dence that he was a man of genius (I regard as al-
together foolish the tendency, so popular today, to
abolish this category), but also that he had marked
dictatorial inclinations. The decisions we had
made took us in entirely different directions. He
sought to reform (or perhaps I should say revolu-
tionize) German Jewry from within. I, on the
other hand, no longer had any hopes for the amal-
gam known as German Jewry and expected a re-
newal of Jewry to come about only through its re-
birth in Eretz Yisrael. Nonetheless, we were cer-
tainly interested in one another. Never before (or
since) had I met a person of such intense Jewish
commitment as Rosenzweig, who was midway in
age between Buber and me. What I did not know
was that he regarded me as a nihilist.

My second visit to Frankfurt, which involved a
nightlong discussion about the very German Jewry
that I rejected, was the occasion for a complete
break between us. I would never have broached
this delicate topic, which inflamed both of us so
much, if I had known that Rosenzweig was by
then already in the first stages of his fatal disease,
lateral sclerosis. He had had an attack which had
not yet been definitely diagnosed, but I had been
told he was on the mend, except for a certain dif-
ficulty in speaking which still remained. In any
case, there occurred that night one of the stormiest
and most irreparable arguments of my youth.

Years later, Buber and Ernst Simon asked me to
contribute to a portfolio of essays which was to be
presented to Rosenzweig on his fortieth birthday,
and I did so. By then, he was already paralyzed
and unable to speak. When I was in Frankfurt in
August 1927, Ernst Simon said to me: "Rosen-
zweig would be very pleased if you visited him." I
went, and gave an account of my work to this mor-
tally ill man, who could move only one finger and
communicated by pushing a specially constructed
needle over an alphabet field which his wife
spelled out into sentences. It was an unforgettable
hour, one that cut me to the quick. Yet even dur-
ing those years Rosenzweig produced some very
impressive work, took part in the Bible translation
project inaugurated by Buber, and carried on an
overabundant correspondence.

UPON my return to Berlin, I reported
for my Staatsexamen in mathematics
and also bought mathematical textbooks in He-
brew to familiarize myself with the terminology I
would have to know as a teacher in Eretz Yisrael.
My father, who had been impressed by my docto-
rate after all and who thought the offer of a Ha-
bilitation would cure me of my "youthful follies,"
had my dissertation printed in his shop whenever
a typesetter had a free hour or two. In those days.

at the height of the inflation, this was no small
matter— for a long time it had been impossible to
have dissertations published, because no one was
able to raise the money. At any rate. Das Buck
Bahir ("The Book of Bahir") was ready in a year
and appeared in the Eisler series I mentioned ear-
lier under the imprint of Drugulin, the house
which was bringing out all the expressionijtJitera-
ture being published by Kurt Wolff in those days.

In the meantime, I continued my preparations
in the field of Kabbalah. To deepen my knowl-
edge of Hebrew literature I spent countless hours
in the library of Moses Marx, Agnon's brother-in-
law, with whom I had become friends after my re-
turn from Switzerland. This curious individual
was the co-owner of a textile firm on Spittelmarkt,
but his heart belonged to Hebrew typography and
bibliography, though he scarcely understood the
contents of the books he tended so lovingly and
had so wonderfully bound by Berlin's most out-
standing craftsmen. He was one of the many vic-
tims of the illusion— caused by the inflation— of
being very rich, when in reality he had nothing
left. A sensitive and vulnerable man, Marx com-
bined intense Jewish feeling (he had embraced
Zionism as soon as he abandoned Orthodoxy)
with more than a trace of the typical Prussian per-
sonality. Later on I met a number of other people
of this type, but Marx remained the most vivid ex-
ample. We would often take the long ride to-
gether on top of the double-decker bus from the
Spittelmarkt to Helmstedter Strasse at the Bayr-
ischer Platz, where he lived. Several times I stayed
at his house from seven at night to seven in the
morning, browsing with fascination among the
thousands of volumes in his library.

Among the books he owned was a complete set
of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata,
the most important Latin work on the Kabbalah,
published between 1677 and 1684. To buy these
volumes, which totalled 2,500 pages, was beyond
my means, but one day Marx came to call at our
house on Neue Griinstrasse to have a look at my
kabbalistic collection in the making. "Well, and
what are you two going to admire each other out
of this time?" asked my mother, who had a gift for
vivid expression. And in fact Marx did find an ex-
tremely rare little cabbalisticum which had ap-
peared at Saloniki in 1546 and still had its won-
derful original Turkish binding with leather tool-
ing. I had bought it a short time before on my
visit to Frankfurt for a hundred marks (then a
half-dollar). "What do you want for it?" Marx
asked me. "Kabbalistic books I can't swap." "Tell
me anyway." "Well, if you insist, I'll make you an
offer you certainly won't accept. I'll trade it for
your Kabbalah Denudata." Marx winced and said
nothing. But the next time I came to see him he
suddenly blurted out angrily: "Go ahead and take
it. The Kabbalah Denudata can always be had for
money, but your old book isn't to be had for any
amount." So that is how I came to own those valu-

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/47

able volumes, though it really did take fifteen
years before I was able to get hold of the little Sa-
loniki book again at an auction in Amsterdarpi.

JETWEEN 1921 and 1923 I had many
► dealings, albeit indirect ones, with the
group around Oskar Goldberg. The Kabbalah was
highly regarded by this group— not so much for its
religious and philosophical aspects as for its
magical implications about which Goldberg (the
only one in the circle who really knew Hebrew)
had the most extravagant notions.

Short pieces by members of this group had
begun appearing in print while I was still in Mu-
nich; and some of them, particularly by Erich
Unger, Ernst Fraenkel, and Joachim Caspary, dis-
played a high degree of intelligence. In 1922,
Unger published a metaphysical diatribe against
Zionism with the pretty title, "The Stateless
Founding of a Jewish People," which was really
quite something. It censured practical Zionism,
which the author rejected, for being deficient in
"metaphysics," but what Unger meant was not so
much metaphysics as magical power (not intended
metaphorically) which, according to Goldberg's
doctrine, should be possessed by metaphysically
charged "biological entities." Instead of learning
how to work magic, the Zionists— according to the
author— were wasting their energies on the build-
ing of villages, settlements, and similar nonsense
that could not promote that Jewish "magical
faculty" which needed renewal. All this was some-
what obscured by the elegant language in which
the lecture was couched, but intelligent readers
could not help noticing that it was the salient
point of this remarkable essay. Later on, in Gold-
berg's own writings, the point was expressed
rather more bluntly and with appropriate invec-
tive.

Strangely enough, Buber knew nothing about
the activities of these new magico-metaphysicians,
but when I told him about them on one of, his vis-
its to Munich, he was reminded of an incident in
which both Unger and Goldberg had figured. Dur-
ing the war, it seems, around 1916 or 1917, a Mr.
Unger had shown up in Heppenheim to discuss an
urgent matter with him. He had explained to
Buber how important it was to end the war, and
pointed out that there was really only one way of
doing it: to establish contact with the "higher
powers" guiding humanity and to persuade them
to act. These forces were the Mahatmas in distant
Tibet, the famous sages of the "White Lodge" in-
vented by Madame Blavatsky, and there was only
one person who could make contact with them. It
was therefore urgent to get this person out of
Germany so he could travel to India via Switzer-
land.

Buber told me he had been greatly astonished
and had asked Unger what his own function was
in all this. To his even greater astonishment,
Unger had replied that Buber should use his ex-

cellent connections to secure an exit permit for
Dr. Goldberg. "Those people really seemed to be-
lieve I had some sort of connection with the For-
eign Office," Buber told me, "but I had to disillu-
sion them on that score." As proof of Goldberg's
uncanny abilities (Buber had never heard of him)
Unger presented a pamphlet entitled "The Penta-
teuch, an Edifice of Numbers," in which Goldberg
"proved" through numerological calculations that
the Torah must have been written by a superhu-
man intellect— let us say an Elohim. Years later I
learned from Ernst David, who before his "defec-
tion" to the Zionists had belonged to the sect's
inner circle and financed Goldberg's main work.
The Reality of the Hebrews, that his mentor had
long been one of Madame Blavatsky's disciples.

D"

kURiNG my sojourns in Berlin between
1919 and 1923 I also came in contact
with a number of young scholars, somewhat older
than I, who were doing research for an organiza-
tion whose goal— never achieved— was the founding
of an academy for the Science of Judaism. What
was important about this project was that it did
not entail the training of rabbis, and hence did not
involve any commitment to a particular ideology or
party within Judaism; rather, it was to be a pure
research center at which believers, unbelievers, and
atheists alike who cared about furthering the
knowledge of Judaism could work peacefully side
by side. Some were Zionists, some were not, but
nearly all were highly gifted scholars whose names
and achievements still live in Jewish studies-
people like Fritz Yitzhak Baer, Hartwig David
Baneth, Leo Strauss, Selma Stern, and Chanoch
Albeck.

With Baer, in particular, one of the most out-
standing—if not the outstanding— historian of my
generation, I quickly established relations, as well
as with Baneth, a first-rate Arabist. Baneth told
me that Philip Bloch, the former rabbi of Posen
and one of the last surviving pupils of Graetz,
had moved to Berlin and donated his substantial
library (which Baneth was then helping to cata-
logue) to the proposed academy. He suggested
that I go to visit Bloch, who at eighty-one was still
very spry and domiciled together with his library.
Bloch, after all, had been the authority on the
Kabbalah in the generation preceding mine, albeit
an authority in Graetz's own disapproving spirit,
and he was the only Jewish scholar in Germany
who had assembled a rich collection of kabbalistic
works and manuscripts. Bloch received me very
warmly— as a young colleague, so to speak— say-
ing; "After all, we're both meshugga." He then
showed me his kabbalistic collection, and in the
course of admiring the manuscripts, I remarked,
rather naively: "How nice, Herr Professor, that
you've studied all this!" Whereupon the old gen-
tleman replied: "What! Am I supposed to read
this rubbish tool" It was one of the great moments
of my life.

48/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

IN THOSE years the Zionists were a small
but articulate minority in Germany.
Of the Jewish population of 600,000, no fewer
than 20,000 took part in the election of delegates
to the German Zionist convention of 1920, a figure
which— considering the voting age— indicated a
marked increase in the movement's influence since
the pre-war years, The overwhelming majority of
German Zionists were of middle-class orientation.
My own sympathies, however, lay with the radical
circles espousing the social ideals of the budding
kibbutz movement. The anarchist element within
certain groups in Palestine came very close to my
own position of that time. I can still remember
the responsive chord struck in me by an article I
read in 1921, by a leading figure in these circles
which defined the Zionist social ideal as "the free
banding together of anarchistic associations."
(The author of this article later became one of
the most influential would-be Stalinists, having
molted in pure Marxist fashion.)

In any case, it is safe to say that the over-
whelming majority of those who went to Eretz
Yisrael from Germany in the early 20's were moti-
vated by moral rather than political considera-
tions. Emigration was a decision against a life that
was perceived as a dishonest and frequently undig-
nified game of hide-and-seek. It was a decision in
favor of a new beginning which, whether moti-
vated by religious or secular considerations, had
more to do with social ethics than with politics,
strange though that may seem today. In those days
we did not know, of course, that Hitler was in the
offing, but we did know that, in light of the task
before us— the radical renewal of Judaism and
Jewish society— Germany was a vacuum in which
we would choke. This is what drove people like
me and my friends to Altneuland.*

Before I took that step there were a few inter-
ludes. Under the auspices of the Judisches Volks-
hochschule in Berlin, I gave a course on the "His-
tory of Jewish Mysticism" in the winter of 1922
which was astonishingly well attended. It was my
first attempt to present myself as a teacher in this
field, and I can only shudder today when I think
back on those extremely immature lectures. My
students, however, included some unusual "seek-
ers," like one of Berlin's best-known violin makers,
who went on to become the abbott of a Buddhist
monastery and propaganda center in Ceylon.
(Thirty-five years later, he sent me a comprehen-
sive series of Buddhist texts and analyses in Eng-
lish, assembled over a long period.)

The same year 1 became involved in a stormy
polemic against the Jewish hiking club, Blau-
Weiss, which led to my friendship with Ernst
Simon. We met at the end of December 1922
and liked each other almost immediately. Simon
came from an even more de-Judaized home than
I, and the road he had taken was not unlike
mine, although it had been determined by alto-
gether different factors, specifically his experi-

ences in the German army during the war. In
those years Simon was not only wonderful looking
but also incredibly witty, quick on his feet, and a
brilliant speaker; he had written a brilliant disser-
tation on Ranke and Hegel. Without being really
Orthodox, he had decided to live in accordance
with Jewish law. He too told me about the circle
that was then forming around the Freies Judisches
Lehrhaus in Frankfurt which had been founded
by Franz Rosenzweig.

A great deal has been written about this Lehr-
haus, whose leadership had been taken over, after
Rosenzweig himself became incapacitated, by his
disciple Rudolf Hallo. The true star of the enter-
prise was not, as one might expect, Martin Buber,
no matter how crowded his courses were at first.
Rather, it was Rosenzweig's great new discovery,
the chemist Eduard Strauss, whose like is less fre-
quently to be found in Jewish circles than it is
among Christian revival movements. Strauss's lec-
tures at his packed Bible sessions were the utter-
ances of one newly awakened and moved by the
spirit to speak. They can best be described, if one
may be permitted the language of Christian sects,
as "pneumatic" exegeses, and to this day I do not
know whether any record was kept of them, for
Strauss himself spoke quite spontaneously. His lis-
teners sat as though spellbound in a magic circle.
Anyone not susceptible to this kind of spellbind-
ing simply stopped coming— which is what hap-
pened with me. With no previous Jewish back-
ground, and without any ties to Jewish tradition,
Strauss was nevertheless a pure example of a Jew-
ish pietist. Judaism as he saw it was a spiritual
church, and it was precisely this aspect which I
had not been able to stomach in his then widely
read book against Zionism, and which drove me
away from Strauss's Judaism when it was served
up to me personally.

My own courses were something like the exact
opposite of his. With a limited group of students
who already had some knowledge of Hebrew, I
read important texts in the original, keeping to
precise interpretation. These were mystical, apoca-
lyptic, and narrative sources— the very kind most
likely to inspire "pneumatic" exegeses. Every
morning, for example, from eight to nine, before
the doctor at whose place we were studying began
his consultations, I read the Zohar's explication of
the Book of Ruth to a group of students which in-
cluded such interesting men as Erich Fromm,
Ernst Simon, and Nahum Glatzer. With a few
other students I read the biblical Book of Daniel,
the first apocalyptic text in Jewish literature, and
a few stories by Agnon, (This gave a great deal of
pleasure both to my pupils and to Agnon himself,
for in those days he was not yet used to having his
work read in schools.)

Besides the Jewish Lehrhaus there was another

• The reference is to Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902),
a Utopian novel in which the author delineates the ere
by the Jews o£ a model society in the Holy Land.— Ed.

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/49

remarkable institution which created a stir among
young academicians in those days. This was the
"torapeutic" sanatorium, as the wags called it, lo-
cated in Heidelberg where the strictly Orthodox
psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann (a cousin of
Moses Marx and Esther Agnon) was attempting
to combine Torah and Freudian therapy. Some of
my best students and acquaintances from Zionist
youth groups, such as Ernst Simon, Fromm, and
Leo Lowenthal, were being treated at this sanato-
rium on an outpatient basis. All of them, with the
exception of one, had their Orthodox Judaism an-
alyzed away. When I next saw Erich Fromm,
Frieda Reichmann's most famous analysand and
my Zohar pupil, in Berlin about four years later,
he had become an enthusiastic Trotskyite and
pitied me for what he called my petty-bourgeois
provincialism.

At this time Agnon was living outside Frankfurt
at Homburg vor der Hohe, a place that attracted
him not only for its scenic beauty but also, as he
liked to claim, because of the old Hebrew books
which had been published there over 200 years
earlier. In fact, Homburg was one of the great cen-
ters of Hebrew literature. Thanks to the inflation,
living in Germany was extremely cheap for people
who were paid in foreign currency, so that many of
the most important Jewish writers, poets, and
thinkers had congregated there. There was Chaim
Nachman Bialik, for example, indisputably the
brightest star of Hebrew poetry and a true genius
of conversation, as well as Ahad Ha'am and Nathan
Birnbaum, around whom there gathered some of
the outstanding minds of Russian Jewry. Such an
illustrious group could hardly have been found
outside of Russia or— later— of Israel.

Agnon often came in to Frankfurt, where the
main second-hand Hebrew book dealers were lo-
cated, and just as often I would go out to Hom-
burg on the Number 24 streetcar which travels the
same route to this day. Agnon introduced me to
all these people, and Bialik accorded me a very
friendly reception. A German Jew who could
speak Hebrew and read kabbalistic books— Bialik
had never encountered anything like it, and he
maintained his friendly interest in me up until his
death. Agnon frequently took me along on his
walks with Bialik, and their conversations were
memorable (the members of this circle spoke He-
brew almost exclusively). Agnon, who always
pronounced my name in the Galician manner,
used to say: "Schulem, don't forget to write down
what you hear in your notebook." Well, I had
open ears but no notebook, and didn't write any-
thing down.

FTER I had put my Berlin affairs in
\ order, I arranged a joint passage
from Trieste with a very knowledgeable, some-
what younger member of the Frankfurt circle.
This was the now famous medieval scholar Fritz
(Shlomo Dov) Goitein, the scion of a distin-

A*^

guished Moravian-Hungarian family of rabbis
with whom I had stayed on my earlier visits to
Frankfurt and with whom I got along very well.
He had had an excellent Jewish education— his fa-
ther had been a rural rabbi in a Lower Fran-
conian district— and had just taken his doctorate
under the direction of Joseph Horovitz, a first-rate
Arabist. Goitein was a rare blend of the artistic-
even the poetic— and the scholarly, A born school-
master, he was immediately recognized as such by
the director of the Haifa secondary school, one of
the most highly regarded pedagogical institutions
in the country, when the latter came to Germany
in 1922 to recruit qualified teachers for his school.
He gave Goitein a firm contract for the fall of
1923, by which time he would have received his
doctorate, and also interviewed me for a possible
teaching position in mathematics. But he and I, as
the expression goes, were just not on the same
wavelength.

In those days, it was by no means a simple mat-
ter to secure an immigration visa to Palestine. The
British mandatory government, which operated
very timidly, gave the Zionist Organization a fixed
annual number of "certificates," whose recipients
then got a visa from the British consul. Since these
certificates, understandably enough, were given al-
most exclusively to hdlutzim who were going to
work in the agricultural settlements, to avoid cut-
ting down on the number of such immigrants as
far as possible, quite a few people procured ficti-
tious (or, in Goitein's case, genuine) offers of em-
ployment. On the basis of these offers, they would
then receive visas as specialists outside the quota.
(There were also capitalist visas for persons with
sufficient money who were interested in invest-
ment possibilities, but people like us did not fall
into that category.)

Thus, the philosopher Hugo Bergmann, then
the director of the Jewish National Library of Je-
rusalem (which was to serve as the library of the
planned, though as yet nonexistent, Hebrew Uni-
versity), gave me a fictitious appointment as head
of the library's Hebrew section. This had been ar-
ranged by my fiancee Escha, who had gone over as
the equally fictitious fiancde of Abba Khoushi,
later the mayor of Haifa. Escha and I had decided
to get married in Eretz Yisrael.

Hugo Bergmann had met both of us in Berne in
March of 1919, and we had been mutually im-
pressed with one another. I had not particularly
liked his essays in Der Jude or his writings in the
Buber spirit, but I was surprised to find him to-
tally devoid of sentimentality, open to all intellec-
tual and social matters, and inclining to a view of
Zionism that was closely akin to my own. When I
wrote him early in 1923 about my intention of
coming over, he sent me a very encouraging re-
sponse, and Escha did the rest.

In Berlin I informed my father that I planned
to emigrate at the beginning of September and
that this move would dispose of the chimera of my

50/COMMENTARY MAY 1980

academic future in Germany. All my father said
was: "My son, I assume you realize that you can-
not expect any financial support for your un-
dertaking from me." I replied that I fully realized
this, and we did not discuss the subject further.
But he did send over the shipping cletk from our
print shop to help me pack my library, which al-
ready consisted of 2,000 volumes and ^vas shipped
by freighter via Hamburg. For reasons never quite
clear to me, I had to send customs a typewritten
list of my books, and I still have a copy of it.

IN mid-September 1923 Goitein and I
met in Trieste. At that time there were
no boats sailing directly to Palestine. The Lloyd
Triestino line sent ships only as far as Alexandria,
and from there, those who did not want to take
the railroad via El Arish and Gaza (built by the
British during the war), took a small coastal
steamer. This boat called at the various Levantine
ports, including Jaffa, where Escha was waiting for
me at the harbor.

I arrived in Jerusalem on September 30 and was
promptly faced with a far-reaching decision, for
within a short time I was offered two positions.
The mathematician of the teachers' college, a Dr.
Chermoni, had just received a scholarship for ad-
vanced study abroad and an immediate replace-
ment was needed. Dr. Lurie, the head of the He-
brew school system in the Jerusalem Zionist Exec-
utive, wanted to know whether I had really stud-
ied mathematics, could present a diploma or its
equivalent, and would be able to teach mathemat-
ics in Hebrew. I could answer yes to all these ques-
tions in good conscience, and Dr. Lurie offered me
the job, provided I could start in a week. "You
would be entitled to a salary of fifteen pounds a
month," he told me, "but of course we cannot pay
you, because, as you know, the Zionist Executive
has no money." Instead of wages, I, like all other
teachers and officials during that period, would re-
ceive a credit voucher for a consumer cooperative
where I could get all the food I needed. In those
days salaries were paid seven months late and it
never occurred to anyone to go on strike. Everyone
knew that the Zionists had no money, and if they
did, they needed it for purposes of settlement. I
promised to think it over.

At the same time Hugo Bergmann, who had cer-
tified the earlier, fictitious job for me, now offered
me a real one as librarian of the Hebrew section
of the National Library. "You're just what we
need," he told me. "You know everything about
Hebrew books, you're a disciplined person, and
you're knowledgeable in Jewish matters. I can
offer you ten pounds a month, which of course
won't be paid . . ." (and so on, as above). Berg-
mann told me I could start right away. The work-
ing hours were from seven-thirty in the morning
to two in the afternoon, which would leave me
time for my kabbalistic studies. "I'll write the Zi-

onist Executive and tell them to put you on the
payroll," he concluded. "The Executive never an-
swers mail, so everything will be all right."

I weighed the two proposals; teacher of mathe-
matics or librarian for Hebrew literature? Escha
and I wanted to get married, and she was earning
six pounds a month— a livable salary at the time.
As a teacher I would have papers to grade in the
afternoon, and who could say whether the stu-
dents might not laugh at my Berlin-accented He-
brew? (The Russian accent was the predominant
one in Jerusalem during those years.) In the li-
brary, on the other hand, I would be dealing with
books all day, and I was interested in almost every-
thing about them; then, too, I would have my af-
ternoons and evenings free for my own work. So
in the end I chose the position that paid less,
which meant the end of my mathematics, though I
kept my mathematical books on my shelves for a
few more years.

Bergmann did write that letter to the Zionist
Executive, and— wonder of wonders!— a reply ac-
tually came three days later. "Please dismiss Dr.
Scholem immediately," it said. "Are you not aware
of the fact that the Zionist Executive has no
money to pay an additional librarian?" Bergmann
showed me the letter. "Nu?" said I. "We'll write
another letter," said he. "And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, we'll pay you out of the schnor-
ring fund." The schnorring fund was a supply of
cash that had been left behind as a good-will
token by tourists from England, America, South
Africa, and other countries with hard currency
after Bergmann had described to them the plight
of the National Library which had no budget for
the acquisition of books. Thanks to this fund, I
was one of the few people who received their sal-
ary in cash.

There were other signs and wonders in the Zi-
onist Executive as well, though in the London
headquarters rather than Jerusalem. Five months
later a letter came from Chaim Weizmann's secre-
tary for university affairs, Leo Kohn, with the
good news that the Executive had decided to ac-
quire the famous library of the even more famous
Islamist, Professor Ignaz Goldziher of Budapest,
for a future Arabic Institute at the university.
They would therefore need a librarian trained as
an Arabist, and wanted Bergmann to recommend
one. Bergmann showed me the letter and I in-
stantly recommended my friend Baneth from Ber-
lin who met all the requirements. Bergmann
wrote to London, and Baneth was enthusiastically
approved-moreover, at a salary of 25 pounds a
month. Bergmann was jubilant: "Now we've got
them! In Jerusalem they can't spare ten pounds
for you, and the Londoners ask whether twenty-
five pounds would be enough for Baneth! I'll give
them a piece of my mind and demand parity: fif-
teen pounds a month for each." Thus did I come
to be legalized.

In 1924 I began publishing in Hebrew, and I

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/51

also edited the first three volumes of a quarterly
on Hebrew bibliography whicH was published by
the library. Since then I have written a large share
of my work in that language, which was not al-
ways easy for me in the early years. Although I
had had intensive instruction in Hebrew, I still
had a long way to go before achieving that con-
versance with Hebrew thought patterns and the
imagery of the Hebrew sources which makes
efiEective expression possible. I would say that the
number of German Jews of my generation who
traveled this road with some success has remained
below ten. But I was fortunate.

THE time of my arrival in Eretz Yisrael
—the beginning of the 20's— was a
high point in the Zionist movement. A segment of
youth I can only characterize as glowing in its ex-
pectation of the great things that lay ahead had
come to Eretz Yisrael to exert enormous efforts at
founding a Jewish society that would have a pro-
ductive life of its own. Despite the shadows visibly
gathering on the horizon, those were important
and wonderful years. People lived in a rather nar-
row circle, for there were not yet very many Jews
in the country— when I came, for example, there
were fewer than 100,000. Yet one felt a kind of
great surge emanating from these young people
who had made the Zionist cause their own.

What these young people possessed quite natu-
rally—and it should never be forgotten that Zion-
ism was essentially a youth movement— was histor-
ical consciousness, something destructively lacking
in the youth movements that came into being fifty
years later, for whom indeed it even became a
kind of dirty idea. There was, to be sure, a dialec-
tic concealed in this historical consciousness of the
Zionists— a consciousness which I shared with all
my heart and all my soul— a dialectic of continu-
ity and revolt. But it would not have occurred to
any of us to deny the history of our people once
we had recognized or rediscovered it. Whatever we
might have been striving for now, it was in our
bones. With our return to our own history we, or
at least most of us, wanted to transform it, but we
did not want to deny it. Without this religion, this
"tie to the past," the enterprise was (and is) hope-
less and doomed to failure from the start.

In the years ahead, other problems would come
to light: were we a sect or a vanguard? Would the
Jews take possession of their own history or would
they not? What form should their existence take
in this historical environment which they had
reentered? Could their life here be established on
firm foundations without the Arabs? With the
Arabs? In conflict with the Arabs? On questions
like these, opinions began to diverge when I came
to Eretz Yisrael, but on the central question, there
was no dispute.

My friends went to the new kibbutzim to put
into practice the socialist way of life and socialist

methods of production. Other people remained in
the cities as teachers, officials, merchants, and in
some cases real-estate speculators— an almost sure-
fire business venture and the inveterate subject of
strife between the land reformers and the capital-
ists in the country. Among all these sectors, there
was vital communication and also enormous hos-
pitality. Everyone was always dropping in on
everyone else, and wherever you went, you found
a place to sleep— it was years before I got used to
the idea of staying in a hotel occasionally. There
was a time, quite literally, when hardly a house
was ever locked in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. When
you went out, you left the door open and it never
occurred to anyone that there might be a burglary.
And in fact, there never was any stealing, but
when we got home we were likely to find someone
asleep in our bed— the friend of a friend who had
been given our address and wanted to spend the
night.

EscHA and I were married in November
1923 and moved into two rooms in an
Arab house whose walls, believe it or not, were al-
most four feet thick— consisting of two stone parti-
tions separated by a space filled with bricks and
the like. This served as excellent insulation, keep-
ing the house cool in the summer and relatively
warm in winter. There was no running water, no
electricity, and no telephone, and so we received
no bills for such services. The water came from a
big cistern. In times of drought we filled it with a
hundred donkey-loads of water bought from an
Arab. Our house was located on the Abyssinian
Road which still looked exactly as it had during
the Turkish period. It started at Mea She'arim
and, winding around the Abyssinian church,
ended at the Street of the Prophets, a wide thor-
oughfare which was even paved in some places
and lined with hospitals, various Christian institu-
tions, and foreign consulates. Only beyond this
street did the new Jewish district begin, though
our sandy path, which was settled almost entirely
by citizens already prominent, or destined to be
so, was already something like a Zionist center.
(The real-estate ^ent was a Jew who had been
baptized by the Christian mission.)

Our house lay directly beyond the wall, still in-
tact, which separated the utlra-Orthodox Mea
She'arim ("One Hundred Gates") district from
the quarters of the not-so-pious. (Originally there
had been only four— not a hundred— gates facing
in all four directions; the district had been built
in 1871 like a fortress in the middle of the rocky
desert one kilometer outside the Old City of Jeru-
salem.) Outside the walls of this Orthodox para-
dise we lived, one might say, in almost allegorical
fashion. The National Library was at that time
just two minutes up the street, and two minutes
down the street was a cluster of second-hand
bookstores whose owners, thank God, knew little
about the treasures they guarded, having acquired

52/COMMENTARY MAY 1

them for next to nothing from the widows of de-
ceased immigrants. (True, they could read, but
Hebrew bibliography was unknown to them.) If
my place of work was up the street, down the
street was my playground.

In the years following World War I Jerusalem
was saturated with old Hebrew books the way a
sponge is saturated with water. Jerusalem had al-
ways been the destination of Jews from all parts of
the world: they came there— most of them with
their books— to pray, to study, and to die. There
had been a terrible famine during the war years in
which a great many people had died, but their
books remained, and great masses of them lay
around in the Jewish district of the Old City and
in the Mea She'arim quarter.

Many books were being bought, but there was
hardly any market for kabbalistic ones. To be
sure, there were still the last Kabbalists in Jerusa-
lem, gathered around the venerable center of mys-
tic tradition and meditative prayer that had ex-
isted in the Old City for almost two centuries, but
they acknowledged only one approach to Kabba-
lah as truly authentic, and they had no use for
kabbalistic literature which did not conform to
this approach, let alone for hasidic literature,
which was a kind of popular Kabbalah. Thus, I
was one of the few buyers on this market, and if I
had had enough money I might have cornered it
entirely before other collectors began to offer com-
petition. At any rate, my growing passion for col-
lecting was developing powerfully, limited only by
my meager purse. What a great day it was for me
when one of the noblest rabbis of Mea She'arim, a
man who disdained all fanaticism, sold his marvel-
ous library to provide his daughter with a decent
dowry!

When I came from Germany in 1923, I brought
with me 600 volumes in the field; since then I
have accumulated a total of more than 7,000, and
once, in my youthful folly, I even had a negative
catalogue printed up, listing the books I didn't
own. (The title of this catalogue was a biblical
quotation which in the original means "Go in
peace" [Judges 18:6] but could also be under-
stood to mean "Come to Scholem." In Hebrew a
title with a dual meaning has always been prized.)
Of course I did pay a certain price for my insist-
ence on negotiating with the book dealers only in
Hebrew, for if I had spoken Yiddish with them as
my most successful competitors did (including
Agnon), I would have been able to acquire the
books much more cheaply. I was paying for what
might be called my Hebraistic fanaticism.

THOUGH the institution I worked in
was called the National and Univer-
sity Library, the university itself was not yet in
evidence, except for one building which was under
construction, the Institute of Biochemistry, for
which Chaim Weizmann, himself a biochemist,
had raised the funds. A committee consisting of a

few Jerusalem notables carried on fruitless discus-
sions about the coming university and its profes-
sorships, but no one else in the country believed
that the project, which had been decided upon in
1913, and for which a symbolic cornerstone had
been laid in 1918, would come to fruition in the
foreseeable future. Nor was there any lack of skep-
tics and opponents. After all, there was already a
sizable Jewish academic proletariat in the country
in those days— was the number of unemployed
Jewish intellectuals to be augmented still further
by opening an institution that would issue diplo-
mas? Many people shuddered at the prospect. Fur-
thermore, as I have already said, the Zionists had
no money, though the idea of a Hebrew Univer-
sity in Jerusalem was useful for propaganda pur-
poses. Suddenly, however, events took an unex-
pectedly favorable turn.

In the fall of 1922 Judah Magnes settled in Je-
rusalem with his family. Magnes was one of the
outstanding figures of Jewish public life in the
United States, who at forty-five already had an ex-
tremely varied and dramatic career behind him.
This extraordinary individual, whom I would
come to know for twenty-five years, was a complex
and very charming personality who combined the
elements of an American radical, a Zionist of the
Ahad Ha'am type, and a defector from Reform to
Conservative Judaism with the unmistakable ele-
ments of a popular leader.

Though at first Magnes had probably planned
to work in the socialist labor movement within
Zionism, he soon began taking an interest in the
projected university, and it was evidently he who
interested the wealthy banker Felix Warburg and
his wife, both of whom respected him greatly, in
the idea of a Hebrew University when they visited
Jewish Palestine in April 1924. At that time, War-
burg was one of the most influential Jews in
America, and was concerned with Jewish interests
without being a Zionist. When he left the country
he gave Magnes a sealed envelope containing—
though Magnes did not know it yet— a substantial
check for the establishment of a Jewish Institute
at the university. Others followed suit, and the
dream began to assume concrete form. Late in
1924 the Institute was opened, and in April 1925
the Hebrew University itself was inaugurated with
great ceremony, and Magnes was named its Chan-
cellor.

Lord Balfour, the author of the Balfour Decla-
ration, as well as the greats of the Zionist move-
ment from Weizmann and Rabbi Kook to Bialik
and Ahad Ha'am, sat on the tribune of the amphi-
theater which had been carved out of the rock of
Mount Scopus only a short time before. I was
among the thousands who excitedly followed this
ceremony, and I can still picture Lord Balfour,
old and magnificent-looking, standing against the
setting sun, delivering his eulogy of the Jewish
people, its achievements in the past, and its hopes
for the future.

HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/53

IN THE meantime, a specially appointed
committee of Jewish scholars began a
search for the right people to grace an institute
for research into all aspects of Judaism and its his-
tory. There was no thought of diplomas yet, God
forbid. Rather, the search was under way for
scholars who would devote themselves wholeheart-
edly to these studies for their own sake and not for
the training of teachers, let alone rabbis. Since the
most eminent scholars of the older generation,
though highly sympathetic, were not willing to
come to Jerusalem for more than a semester or a
year, younger men were afforded an unprece-
dented chance to help build the new institute.

As the Jewish world was being scoured,
Magnes's attention lit on me as well. Kabbalah? A
very peculiar subject! But wonderfully suited to
this particular institute, which was more of an
academy than anything else. Though it would
never occur to anyone to choose it as a branch of
study, the Kabbalah fitted beautifully into the
general scheme as a pure object of research and an
area in which, according to the general consensus,
much remained to be done. And to think that the
very same young man who had really delved into
this field on his own was already living in Jerusa-
lem and would not have to be paid to relocate!
But how could his scholarly qualifications be as-
certained? I did, of course, have three advocates

on the committee: Bialik, Martin Buber, and
Aron Freimann, but Bialik was, after all, a poet;
Buber's name at that time was not exactly consid-
ered the best of recommendations, though he could
not very well be disregarded; and Freimann,
though an important bibliographer, was neither a
philosopher nor a historian of religion.

Magnes then wrote to two universally recog-
nized authorities— not in Kabbalah, since there
were none, but in Jewish philosophy and Jewish
studies generally. One was Julius Guttmann, the
head of the Academy Institute in Berlin, who rec-
ommended me warmly on the strength of my phil-
osophical education and previous work. The other
was Immanual Low in Szegedin, at that time one
of the "grand old men" of the Science of Judaism.
Low was a scholar with an encyclopedic educa-
tion, but his specialty was the field of botany in
rabbinic literature, and he was enthusiastic about
all studies combining Judaism and the exact sci-
ences. To this day he is widely known as the au-
thor of the five-volume work, The Flora of the
Jews; I think I am the only one who ever laughed
at this strange title. Low wrote that I should defi-
nitely be appointed. He had read my book and
found two excellent pages in it on the hermaphro-
ditism of the palm tree in kabbalistic literature.
He added that the man who had written them
could be relied upon.